Salon Cinema

50sSNIPES on December 16, 2024 at 5:30 pm

During the massive growth of movie theaters across Japan during the latter half of the 1950s, Hiroshima City had a grand total of 52 movie theaters as of 1960, with ten of them in its Main Street known as the Aioi-dori in Hiroshima. Unfortunately Hiroshima had a massive downfall to just 28 movie theaters as of 1980.

Both the Hiroshima Toei Theater on the fourth floor and the Hiroshima Toei Underground Theater in the basement both in a reinforced concrete building opened their doors on September 28, 1956, with the Hiroshima Toei Theater screening Toei films with 1,110 seats while the Hiroshima Toei Underground Theater screened foreign films with 460 seats. The Underground Theater was later renamed the Hiroshima Toei Palace on September 2, 1972, while the fourth floor theater retained its original name. This was followed by a downgrade of its seating in both auditoriums from 1,110 and 460 to 718 and 352.

Both the Hiroshima Toei and Palace Theaters closed on April 12, 1993 due to the aging of the building, and the building was complete rebuilt, taking an estimate of more than two years to build.

The two theaters reopened on the 8th floor of the Hiroshima Toei Plaza Building as the Hiroshima Toei and Hiroshima Louvre on October 7, 1995 with the Japanese film “Kura” in Screen 1 and Clint Eastwood in “The Bridges At Madison County” in Screen 2, with a downsized capacity of 436 seats (258 in Toei and 178 in Louvre) featuring both 35mm projection and Dolby 5.1 sound. The Toei theater retains as a Toei, while the Louvre theater shows foreign films from Shochiku and Tokyu as an affiliation of the Marunouchi Louvre chain, but occasionally shows films from all three auditoriums of Tokyo’s Marunouchi Piccadilly. It’s box office was located on the first floor, and both the Toei and Louvre auditoriums had a single slope with their screens being installed at a high position so that way the attendance could easily see the picture from any position.

Unfortunately in the 2000s, attendance numbers begin to decline due to the influence of multiplexes, as well as the nearby popularities of the TOHO Cinemas Midori, the Warner Mycal Cinemas Hiroshima, and the Hiroshima Wald 11.

The Hiroshima Toei and Hiroshima Louvre closed for the final time on November 13, 2009, and after its closure, the site of the ticket office was converted into a prize exchange office for the Shinrai no Mori Hiroshima Hatchobori store.

On September 28, 2014, the eighth floor of the Toei Plaza Building was again reopened back as a movie theater under the Salon Cinema name, which was relocated from its original location in the Takanobashi area of ​​Otemachi, Naka Ward.

• The original Salon Cinema originally opened in 1959 as the Takanobashi OS (later renamed Takanobashi Nichigeki), followed by a second theater named the Takanobashi Daiei in 1962. The Takanobashi OS was renamed the Salon Cinema 1 on March 1, 1972 and the Nichigeki was renamed the Salon Cinema 2 on April 29, 1994. Both theaters closed on August 31, 2014 and were relocated to the former sites of the Hiroshima Toei and Hiroshima Louvre the following month.